Facebook remains one of the best platforms to use for social media marketing, with over 3 billion active users today, and the average person spends around 31 minutes every day on the site. Determining the best time to post on Facebook could help you get the best results and reach your audience when it’s most active, leading to more impressions and overall engagement, but the specific time will depend on certain factors.
In this article, Ashley Nigro, Sr. Social Media Strategist, will break down how to find the times that work best for both your brand and your audience to increase your engagement, your reach, and even your sales.
What You’ll Learn:
- What is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?
- How to Find the Best Time to Post on Facebook For Your Brand
- Best Times to Post on Facebook By Day
- Rallio, Your Tool and Scheduling Resource
- FAQs: Best Times to Post on Facebook
What is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?
The best time to post on Facebook can vary depending on your target audience and industry. Generally, the ideal posting times can be influenced by when your audience is most active.
For instance, if you want to engage with mothers of newborns, posting during the night when they may be up feeding their babies could be strategic.
However, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, some optimal times for posting on Facebook are Wednesdays at 11 am and 1 pm.
When are most people on Facebook? Well, some other recommended times include:
- 9:00 am – Monday through Friday
- 11:00 am – Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday
- 3:00 pm – Monday and Tuesday
- 4:00 pm – Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
- 6:00 pm – Friday
If your goal is to boost engagement, focus on weekday posting, as Sunday tends to have the lowest engagement. The most consistent engagement occurs on weekdays between 9 am and 3 pm, typically when people are browsing Facebook at work.
Another study done by CoSchedule took different industry patterns into account.
CoSchedule’s research also considered different industry patterns, highlighting that the timing may vary based on how specific target markets use social media.
Both Influencer Marketing Hub and CoSchedule studies agree that posting during weekdays generally yields better results compared to weekends.
Expert Insights: When to Post On Facebook
If you’re looking for the best times to post on Facebook, I’ve found that this largely depends on your audience. Identifying the right times to post can significantly boost your Facebook marketing efforts in the long term.
Contrary to one-size-fits-all solutions, the optimal time to post varies significantly across brands, influenced by factors like audience demographics, industry, and content type. Conducting thorough social media audience analysis can reveal precise posting times tailored to your specific brand and audience needs.
It’s essential for brands to dive deep into their own Facebook analytics to understand when their audience is most active and responsive. This data-driven approach not only helps in building a consistent posting schedule tailored to your specific audience but also ensures that your content has the best chance of being seen and interacted with.
By aligning your posting schedule with your audience’s Facebook usage patterns, you can significantly increase the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Pro Tip: Be sure to analyze the Posts section to see when your fans are online the most. You can find all the data you’ll need directly in the app.
Understanding Facebook’s Algorithm
Before determining the best times to post on Facebook, it’s important to understand how the platform’s algorithm works.
The main factors the algorithm takes into account to display posts include:
- Relevance: The algorithm looks at each user’s interests and preferences to personalize their feed with the content they’re most likely to enjoy, along with specific preferred content types.
- Engagement: Additionally, Facebook considers interactions among users for each post, such as likes, shares, and comments, including the number and frequency of comments.
- Recency: Facebook tends to prefer newer posts over older ones, although the algorithm could bring older posts to the fore if they’re relevant and engaging.
Even with these algorithm-driven feeds in place, it’s still critical to determine the best day and time to post on Facebook if you want to maximize engagement.
Some types of content do better on the algorithm than others, such as:
- Short videos and Reels that can quickly grab people’s attention
- Facebook Live videos that encourage real-time comments and interaction
- Reviews and testimonials for your business
- Questions and polls that further boost engagement
- Infographics, memes, and other visual content
- Highly relatable posts that reflect your audience’s personal experience
Consider Using Facebook Reels When Determining the Best Time to Post on Facebook.
How to Find the Best Time to Post on Facebook For Your Brand
Finding the best time to post on Facebook for your brand involves understanding your target audience and tailoring your strategy to their preferences. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Know Your Target Audience
Understanding the demographics and behavior of your Facebook audience is crucial for creating content that resonates with them. Begin by answering key questions about your audience:
- What are their demographics? Age? Gender?
- What do they do for a living?
- Where do they live?
- What’s their highest level of education?
- What is their online behavior like?
- What are their preferred social networks and connections with brands?
By creating a comprehensive buyer persona, you can gain a deeper understanding of your Facebook audience and determine when they are most likely to use the platform.
A few examples:
- College students have different schedules than middle-aged professionals, so their online activity times differ.
- Stay-at-home moms may be more active on social media in the evening after their daily chores are done.
- Business executives may engage during early mornings or lunch breaks when they have fewer meetings scheduled.
Once you’ve defined your target audience, create content that caters to their specific preferences and behavior patterns.
For example, if you’re offering “mommy and me” dance lessons in a suburban area, your target persona might include:
- Demographics: Women aged 25-35
- First-time moms with toddlers
- Stay-at-home moms, work-from-home moms, or part-time working moms
- Residents of local suburban areas
- College-educated or higher
Step 2: Pay Attention to Time Zones
Consideration of time zones is crucial when determining the best posting times on Facebook, especially if your audience is spread across different regions. Here are some key points to keep in mind:
- It’s not just about knowing the time of day; it’s also about understanding the time zones of your audience. Different regions may be in different time zones, so you must adjust your posting schedule accordingly.
- To simplify this process, you can rely on industry standards. Schedule your posts based on where the majority of your audience is located. If you have a global audience, tools like Google Analytics can assist in identifying peak times across various time zones.
- In the United States, approximately 50% of the population is in the Eastern Time Zone, and when you combine the Eastern and Central Time Zones, you cover nearly 80% of the population. Additionally, these two time zones are only an hour apart, making it convenient for scheduling posts to reach a broad U.S. audience.
Step 3: Look at What the Stats Say
Here’s a summary of some insights and key takeaways from various sources:
- HubSpot suggests that the best times to post are at 9 am on any weekday or between 1 pm and 3 pm from Thursday through Sunday.
- Hootsuite recommends posting between noon and 3 pm on any weekday.
- Sprout Social states that the best day to post on Facebook is any day of the work week, while the worst days are Sundays.
Key Points to Remember:
- These results should serve as general guidelines and a starting point for businesses new to Facebook. However, it’s recommended to conduct your research to find the best posting times that work specifically for your brand.
- Additionally, be mindful of not posting too frequently, as it can annoy users and lead to posts being labeled as spam.
- Experimenting with different times and monitoring the results over time will help you refine your posting strategy for optimal engagement.
Step 4: Use Tools and Analytics
Analyzing your Facebook page’s performance through analytics is a crucial part of optimizing your posting schedule. Here’s how you can use Facebook Insights to determine the best times to post:
- Start by posting consistently to gather data on your audience’s activity and engagement.
- Utilize Facebook Insights, which is a built-in tool provided by Facebook.
- To find your page Insights, go to your Facebook profile and click Insights at the top of your Page.
- To track when your fans are online, you’ll select Posts from the left-hand column. You’ll automatically be given a detailed chart that shows the days and times your fans are most active on Facebook.
- By default, you’ll see averages, but you can hover your cursor over specific times to see how activity compares to the average.
Analyzing this data will allow you to determine the best time slots to target the largest number of fans and optimize your posting schedule accordingly.
Want to know where to see the best times to post on Facebook for your brand? Facebook Insights is especially good for identifying the best time of day to post on Facebook based on the views, reach, visits, and follows you get.
Simply go into the Facebook Insights tool, go into the Insights tab with the three bars on the left, and choose Results.
You’ll see a summary of engagement metrics for the week, which can help you identify patterns when people are most or least engaged.
Finding The Timing of Your Most Successful Posts
In your Insights, you’ll also be able to see the timing of your most successful posts. You’ll start in the same place (the Posts section of Page Insights) and select All Posts Published under the chart.
The Published column will tell you the exact date and time each post was published. Using this data, you can sort through and start to identify common themes or trends regarding publishing times and higher engagement rates.
Keep in mind, that tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and HubSpot streamline the process of measuring and optimizing your brand’s social media presence, leading to better engagement and improved overall performance.
Among other things, these tools can help you identify the best posting times, improve audience targeting, and uncover insights into audience demographics and behavior.
Step 5: Schedule Your Posts Using Social Media Automation
After analyzing your Insights, it’s crucial to implement your findings effectively. One way to do this is through social media automation tools. There are plenty of automation tools to choose from, but we use Sprout Social.
Once you’ve created an account and connected your social media accounts, you’ll enter your content and use the scheduling settings to choose the exact day and time you would like your post to run.
Sprout Social, and other scheduling tools, help your social content stay consistent by allowing you to batch your content and post on a schedule.
Pro Tip: Once you initially determine the best time to post on FB, be sure to automate posting while adjusting based on performance data. Over time, you might find that the best day and time to post on Facebook changes with your audience.
Step 6: Consider The Best Time to Run Ads
In the ever-changing landscape of Facebook, running ads at optimal times can have a significant impact on your advertising success. Here are some key benefits of running ads strategically:
- Boost Reach: Facebook Ads can help by boosting the reach of selected posts beyond the limitations of organic reach, ensuring that your message reaches a broader audience.
- Offer Targeted Exposure: Facebook Ads can efficiently target specific user groups based on demographics, behavior, and interests, which complements organic posts that rely on the existing followership.
- Increase Brand Awareness: Facebook Ads can be used to create increased awareness of your brand’s content, which can work symbiotically with your organic content in creating and supporting brand recognition and trust.
- Drive Traffic and Conversions: Paid ads can help drive traffic and conversions by reaching users who aren’t already aware of or following your brand.
- Promote Testing and Optimizing Content: Insights gained from performance metrics can be used to optimize both paid and organic content, enhancing overall strategy effectiveness.
Also, be sure to test different times and analyze the results, which is key to finding the best times to post on Facebook for your brand specifically.
Based on your engagement goals, regularly monitor metrics and see when people connect the most. For example, if your goal is more likes, you’ll want to pinpoint the best time to post on Facebook for likes over other kinds of engagement.
Engagement trends and Facebook algorithm changes will help you determine how to adjust to further identify the best days and times to post on Facebook.
Also, keep in mind how ad delivery times interact with the Facebook algorithm based on elements like your campaign’s budget pacing and daily peaks, as you work to strike the right balance.
There May Not Be a Single Best Time to Post
Despite all the data in the world, it’s nearly impossible to draw definite conclusions or determine a one-size-fits-all approach.
According to the company’s most recent investment report, Facebook currently has roughly 3.03 billion monthly active users, which is more users than any other social media platform.
This activity is a blessing and a curse. Yes, at least part of your audience is almost sure to be there. But so are all of your competitors.
Increased competition means less exposure for your brand, and with such fierce competition, the most popular times to post could be the worst for your business, as you’re that much more likely to get lost in the shuffle.
Because of this, it’s increasingly important for you to rely on your own analytics and engagement rates to narrow down the times that work best for you.
Additionally, you should conduct A/B testing of your Facebook posts over a two- to four-week period, which can help you more effectively narrow down the best times to post on Facebook. For example, when trying to figure out the best time to post on Facebook on Monday, you may run one post at 9 in the morning and another around noon. You might also try optimizing the content itself, whether it’s a different header, caption, or image, seeing which drives the most engagement at what time.
A/B Testing on Social Media Helps Determine When Is the Best Time to Post on FB.
It’s equally important to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) on social media to confirm the best time to post on Facebook. These critical KPIs and marketing metrics could include click-through rate (CTR), engagement rates, and variable reach, depending on when you post.
Just remember, the Facebook algorithm also prioritizes recency and relevance, so while it’s important to identify the best time to post on FB, this isn’t the only factor to consider.
This chart outlines the best times to post on Facebook, broken down for each day of the week:
Best Times to Post on Facebook By Day
| MONDAY | 9 am, 11 am, 3 pm |
| TUESDAY | 9 am, 11 am, 3 pm |
| WEDNESDAY | 9 am, 10 am, 1 pm, 4 pm |
| THURSDAY | 9 am, 11 am, 4 pm |
| FRIDAY | 11 am, 4 pm, 6 pm |
| SATURDAY | between 10 am and 2 pm |
| SUNDAY | between 9 am and 2 pm *least active day |
You’ll also want to ask, “What are the specific days when most people are on Facebook?”
According to data from Buffer, generally, the best day of the week to post on Facebook is Friday, which sees the most engagement throughout the entire day. Meanwhile, the worst days are Saturday and Sunday, which see far less engagement compared to other days of the week.
Finding the Best Time of Day to Post on Facebook by Objective
You should also consider the objective you want to achieve with your posts. For example, the following are the best days and times to post on Facebook for key metrics:
- For Likes: The best time to post on Facebook for likes is typically at peak engagement hours, when people are actively browsing and scrolling their Facebook feeds for a few minutes and throw out a few likes.
- For Clicks: Meanwhile, a good time to post on Facebook for clicks is usually around midday, when people are taking a break and want to consume content beyond Facebook.
- For Shares/Comments: People tend to connect with posts through shares and comments on the platform during the weekends or evenings, but keep in mind that weekends are the times that generally see the least engagement.
Choosing the Best Times to Post on Facebook by Audience Type
You must also consider the type of audience you want to target to identify a good time to post on Facebook.
Let’s say you want to target young professionals. In these instances, you may find that your audience takes some time in the midday during the week to like, share, and click, likely while on their lunch break.
Meanwhile, stay-at-home parents will probably be more active on Facebook in the morning and during their children’s naptimes in the afternoon.
When targeting international audiences, time zones will heavily influence the best time of day to post on Facebook. Consider which countries will be active when posting based on their respective times.
Content Types and Their Timing
The fact is that different types of content will do better at certain times and on certain days. For instance, you may discover that, for videos, the best time to post on Facebook on Wednesday is in the evenings, while link posts leading to your site observe mornings as the best time to post on Friday.
When is the best time to post on Facebook for each content type?
Here are some guidelines:
Videos
The best time to post on Facebook for videos is generally in the evenings, when people are home from work and actively looking through their feeds for entertaining content that’s easy to digest. Longer videos are particularly good to post around this time. The weekends also tend to favor video content when people are looking to relax.
Image Posts
Meanwhile, for images, the best times to post on Facebook are around the late mornings and early afternoons when people want to consume some quicker content while taking a break. People also often look at image posts during that “afternoon slump” as they seek distractions.
Link Posts
These posts tend to lead to blog posts or other types of longer-form content outside of Facebook. Weekend mornings and evenings are often the best days and times to post on Facebook with this content. During this period, people often have more time to read or view longer content pieces, although Buffer recommends early-morning link posting to gain more traction in people’s feeds over the course of the day, ensuring more people see the content later.
In addition to these content types, you should also take into account the performance of organic vs. paid social content on the platform. Organic content relies more heavily on the algorithm, so relevancy, recency, and engagement will play key roles in determining performance. Meanwhile, with the right targeting, paid content can benefit from more flexible scheduling while reaching the right people at the right time.
Ideally, a good blend of organic and paid content will help you perform better overall as you maximize visibility and engagement.
Rallio, Your Tool and Scheduling Resource
In answering the question of what is the best time to post on Facebook, you can use various tools to help you schedule posts and further refine your timing.
If you need a tool that’s better for local businesses, use Rallio to help determine the best time to post on Facebook. It can help with scheduling, engagement, and analytics.
Some of the pros include enhanced local SEO features, and scalability for multi-location businesses and franchises.
Don’t forget to take a look at your social media analytics to spot traffic and engagement patterns, determining when your audience is at its most active and most likely to engage.
Pro-Tip: Trying to reach audiences across the country or the globe? Take into account time zones when scheduling. You can save more time by batch scheduling content in advance as soon as you create it.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
There are multiple mistakes that businesses often make when figuring out the best times to post on Facebook.
- Over Posting: Some businesses over-post, which can fatigue your audiences or cannibalize your posts collectively as the algorithm struggles to determine which to show to users. Instead, try to determine the most optimal frequency for posts, which is typically around three to five times per week.
- Posting at the Wrong Times: Here’s another issue, making it important to use analytics tools and scheduling solutions to help pinpoint the time when your audience will probably engage with your posts.
- Pay Attention to Critical Analytics: Don’t ignore audience analytics, either, which is another critical mistake. Pay attention to CTR, reach, and engagement metrics like likes and shares to determine how well your posts are performing, and optimize your strategy accordingly.
Also, while you might find generic “best times” to post in your industry, don’t rely on these alone; do some testing to see which of your posts perform the best and when.
FAQs: Best Times to Post on Facebook
1. When is the best time to post on Facebook?
The following are generally the best times to post on Facebook:
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Monday: 9 AM to 12 PM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Tuesday: 9 AM to 12 PM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Wednesday: 8 to 11 AM and 3 to 5 PM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Thursday: 8 AM to 12 PM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Friday: 9 to 10 AM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Saturday: 9 to 10 AM
- Best Time to Post on Facebook on Sunday: 8 AM to 1 PM
2. What is the best day to post on Facebook?
You should figure out which day to post along with the time, as the best time to post on Facebook on Wednesday will differ from the best time to post on Friday, for example. The specific day will depend on factors like your industry and when your audience is engaging with social media.
3. How many times should a business post on Facebook per day?
Typically, it’s best for businesses to post around three to five times per week, which is frequent enough to maintain engagement without leading to over-posting issues like fatigue and poor visibility.
4. Does content type affect the best time to post on Facebook?
Yes, the type of content you post will impact the ideal time to post, whether you’re posting videos, images, or links to other content. You may find that videos perform better when people want entertainment after work, for instance.
5. How can I find my best posting times on Facebook?
Looking into your industry and audience, especially with the help of the right social media management tools, can give you an idea of the right times to post on Facebook and other platforms.
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